Re: code and blockcode

Karl Dubost wrote:

> That was one of the main drawback of the element "q" for quotes.
>
> <q cite="urn:isbn:...">something here</q>
>
> In HTML 4.01, the browser was supposed to implement the right quotes  
> depending on the language detected by the browser.
>
> lang="fr" -> « something here »
> lang="en" -> “something here”
> lang="ja" -> 「something here」
>
> But it has never been implemented correctly. The best implementation  
> I have seen so far of that is IE Macintosh version 5.
>
> in XHTML 2.0, it has been removed in favor of letting the author to  
> put himself the right system of quotes depending on his culture.
>
> <quote cite="urn:isbn:…">« something here »</quote>
>
>
> For programming languages, there will be the same kind of  
> difficulties plus the fact that the number of programming languages  
> keeps growing :)

I don't expect, that browsers do really implement a reasonable amount of 
languages (five was the absolute maximum I could think of). Maybe XML, 
because they have the parser already built in and it's rather simple. 
The XHTML specification should not force this behavior. Drawing it as 
preformated text is sufficient in most cases. But the specification 
could mention the additional applications.

The most important application of such an attribute would be the benefit 
for search engines. And I guess, there will be browser extensions for 
specific languages. People who often visit programming related sites 
because of a specific language will install them.

On the other hand only a minor amount of sites contains code examples. 
That's (indicating a minor demand), why such a feature will not be 
implemented in regular user agents. Considering the voice agent, this 
would be a big amount of development for some languages normal users 
wouldn't want to pay for. Such a system is only appropriate for IT 
professional.

However omitting this attribute doesn't make much sense to me, because 
we could step back to pre then. There is no advantage for any user agent 
(compared to pre). And I think adding this attribute is not a huge step 
for us but a reasonable benefit for some user agents (as pointed out above).

Simon

Received on Tuesday, 12 July 2005 07:46:50 UTC